Antebellum doesn’t so much concertina the past and the present as do a leering jig back and forth, then blow you a callous raspberry instead.

What lifts it to a major degree is Rahim’s performance. We know little of Salahi’s life outside Guantánamo, dealing with him as a virtual blank slate, but he fills this in with a remarkably charismatic personality, riven with contradictions, and clinging to bursts of mischievous humour as a survival strategy.

It takes around three minutes for Chaos Walking to fully set out its premise, and around three seconds more for everyone watching to realise it’s not going to work.

No film has made me ache more for the reopening of cinemas in May than this trashily sublime, visual-effects-driven blare-a-thon, in which a king-sized gorilla and a radioactive lizard settle their differences over the smoking remains of a city or two.

It shares a vague shape and a handful of specific, linchpin scenes with its predecessor, but everything about it lands differently: characters that were previously empty or ludicrous now have real grit and depth, while action sequences that were once incoherent, lightweight and garish now number among the most thunderously spectacular in the genre.

One hopes the golden age isn’t quite over yet, although as Moxie galumphs from one glib, soulless scene to the next, it’s hard not to fear the worst.

What with all this material, and the focus on Cengiz and Abdulaziz as key players in the ongoing story, The Dissident has a lot to juggle. We can forgive Fogel if his portrait of Khashoggi himself seems a touch incomplete: with its restless style of activism, the film arguably builds on his legacy better than it would have done as a work of retrospective biography.

A sensationally funny and gently science-fictional German rom-com.

Refn and Flemming Quist Møller’s screenplay is very good at showing how a destructive belief system such as Nazism can slowly seep through institutions, thanks to nothing more sinister than ordinary people deciding not to rock the boat.

This film’s two hours feel like four.

The main disappointment, other than female characters who only exist to be disposed of, comes from recognising the kernel of something unusual buried in the film’s marrow.

Cherry might represent a drastic shift in scale, tone and subject matter for its directors and leading man alike, but there’s a blockbuster-sized gap where its point should be.

If this is, indeed, the last act, the documentary packs quite a punch. Slickly produced, at times quite flashy and schmaltzy (as was, to be fair, Tina’s musical oeuvre), it nonetheless digs into one of the most shocking, painful yet ultimately triumphant stories in rock history with real zest and flourish, and a determination to face the brutal truth.

This long-overdue sequel to the 1980s hit romcom is no masterpiece, but it’s full of slick cameos, zany set-pieces and eye-popping style.

Bremner, perfectly cast and moving as well as funny, makes McGee an unrepentant showman who’s also an addict high on his own success. It’s refreshing, after the arduous self-pity of Rocketman, to watch a British music biopic which doesn’t wallow in finger-wagging regrets all day.

The film bounces along predictably but charmingly, and parents whose cringe threshold is as low as my own will be relieved to find its sense of humour is gratifyingly un-tacky throughout.

As a straight-up redemptive sob story with no other purpose, it cooks the books.

The film is crammed with so much transporting spectacle and visual invention, it feels epic even at living-room size.

The United States vs Billie Holiday might be all over the shop – a tatty red carpet for its much-ballyhooed star turn. But this other Lady Day still seizes her moment.

The cast’s performances are all so beautifully observed that you may end up wishing the film had given their characters a few more moments of quiet.

An assortment of myths are exploded in Zappa, the baggily engaging docu-portrait directed by Bill & Ted star Alex Winter.

Dropping its leash on a star who needs one, the film mistakes decrepitude for drama, and the closest it gets to mid-scene narrative suspense is wondering whether Al Capone has just let himself go with a number one or two.

Blakeson (The Disappearance of Alice Creed) doesn’t make images pop like the Coens, but he knows how to get a plot simmering, and he can milk a sit-down to perfection.

The trouble begins with a seasick lurching between fantasy and reality, it’s redoubled by subject matter that can’t support that, and it hits a whole arpeggio of duff notes with the casting.

Dead Pigs’s intermingling of grit and polish is hugely satisfying: a potent combination of pearls and swine.

While unlikely to steer future comedy in any direction you could identify – it’s barely in control of its own running time, frankly – the film is genuinely silly, at a time when silliness is quite welcome.

Macdonald and his team pull out enough affecting stories to hold your interest, whose scopes range from sweeping to intimate.

You sense that Washington and Zendaya do both believe in the material, and they certainly throw themselves at it with gusto, but their best moments here are invariably the ones in which they’ve not been given anything to say.

The film’s about a chapter we prefer to get out of the way in adolescence; revisited as this kind of helpless mid-life crisis, it’s exquisite torture.

Strip away the wiring, and Cahill’s film connects most tangibly as a fable about drug addiction – hardly a shock, with all the crystal-obsessed scurrying to make one grey reality bearable, or switch to another outright. He’s had more ingenious ideas, but the whole thing’s strangely charming.

Unusually for a contemporary western, News of the World makes no attempt to reinvent the wheel. Instead, it hammers it diligently back onto the axle, before striking out on a journey whose contours and pitfalls we already know well. Nevertheless, it’s a pleasure to experience it once more with companions like these.

Alive to pulse-quickening details of body language and the conversational codes by which a dangerous friendship lives or dies, the film is a study in contrasts far beyond the monochromatic.

In some passages, the film abides by the biopic rulebook more carefully than it needs to; its best moments are the ones where King and his cast create some tension then simply let it cook.

Land will give you a craving to be in the great outdoors, maybe before it’s even over.

Wheatley and his collaborators have produced something that some of us thought would be impossible: an outrageously entertaining film that feels utterly rooted in the bleak era in which it was made. Lockdown project or not, it’s a milestone.

The tone oscillates between earnestness and mischief, a little uneasily. There’s a trippy, funhouse aspect to it which yields a couple of splattery punchlines, but it could have gone further in this direction

Glass could hardly have asked for two more game accomplices than Clark and Ehle, who play the…well, the you-know-where out of their respective roles, and are both naturally attuned to the film’s murkily sensual, dread-laden wavelength.

There is a special cupboard in Purgatory for films that are blissfully unaware of what they’re actually about, and a place is reserved on its shelves for Love Sarah.

The irresistible comic elegance of the premise – a remarried widower is tormented by the ghost of his first wife – is lost in a mass of pointless embellishments and tinkerings.

The general ineptitude is more likely to make you cackle in disbelief.

As a bouncy childcare aid, it doesn’t exactly fail, but you might be better off asking an eight-year-old about that. It’s witless fare if you want the whole family entertained.

The shape of its story is ultimately conventional, and the way in which it’s told can sometimes feel familiar – like a Sunday evening drama smuggling in big ideas. But the line it draws between the earthy and the ethereal stays with you: it’s a well-timed double dose of consolation and escape.

Its supremely frank and unflinching treatment of its essentially taboo subject gives it a certain brandy-slug of consolatory warmth, despite the bitter chill that blows through most of its scenes.

It’s a punchy, propulsive watch, blown along by snappy editing and a hip-hop-driven soundtrack that stresses that there’s still much fun to be had when hefty themes of inequality and geopolitics are being tackled. And honestly? There really is.

Beneath the mounting contrivances, Dunne’s sturdy performance supplies an earnest core which Lloyd should have trusted more completely.

Great animation can communicate wildly complex ideas with head-spinning clarity and wit, as Docter capably proved with Inside Out – a film which staged the interplay of emotions in an 11-year-old’s head like a vintage sitcom. If anything, Soul pushes this capacity for revelation even further: there are moments of true Blakean mystery and wonder here, expressed with a crispness that feels like a lightbulb snapping on above your head.

This film leaves you itching to read a meaty biography, even as it solidly maps out Hepburn’s emotional life, and explains the relationship with trauma which cut her out so well to be a UNICEF ambassador, raising millions for Bosnian war orphans and Somalian famine relief.

So if Wonder Woman 1984 is playing near you, should you pounce? If it even remotely appeals, I’d say absolutely – even though the film itself, a direct sequel to 2017’s Wonder Woman, is a bit of a marshmallowy muddle.

McQueen’s work seldom features memorable lines; the moments that stay with you are the ones where nothing is said, and his camera stays fixed on an actor’s face.

It’s a project driven by ideas but made for a mass-market audience, which are always welcome in principle. The problem here is the good ideas are all extremely familiar, and the handful of new ones aren’t much to write home about.

Gritty, evocative and poignant, this absorbing tale had the twists and turns of a drama.

The whole thing drips with garish insincerity and preaching to the choir. Irony of ironies, that a show about out-of-touch luvvies swanning down to wave their magic wands at red-state intolerance has become… the spitting image of that, as a home cinema offering from Murphy and team.

Redemption may have eluded Michael Corleone, but his third film was more fortunate.

A documentary that couldn't fail to entertain.

In a story that could have offered a parade of vivid character roles, only Foy and Glen really register: a kindly park ranger (Hakeem Kae-Kazim) deserved more screen time, while the various surly faces on the Manhattan carriage-toting scene are only thinly defined.

Converting dyed-in-the-wool Appalachian pessimism into honest, bootstrappy uplift is not a task you envy Howard or his cast, as the running time slips away and no concrete point materialises. Elegy is four years late and doomed.

Mank feels like both a film for the ages and one hauled up from them: a forbidden tale grave-robbed from the Hollywood catacombs.

It’s the opposite of what a Borat film should feel like: business as usual.

It has a whistle-stop quality, and you sometimes wish it would slow down to savour more personal details, rather than dishing out brisk bullet points from this amazing life.

Rocks would rather reckon with – and in the end, celebrate – youthful potential itself, and its extraordinary ability to flower in even the most unpromising soil.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 is both a courtroom drama for the ages and an urgent shot across the bows.

There may be no more fitting snack for a film that exudes casual bon-vivant allure, but is fundamentally nibbles and froth.

It's as simultaneously chilling and warming as a slug of ice-cold vodka, and just as liable to make your mind swim and eyes prick.

The film makes no attempt to grapple with the American school shooting as a nihilistic cultural phenomenon.

Thanks to both its mesmerising cast and McQueen’s flawless command of atmosphere and mood, it pulls off what I can only describe as a kind of cinematic jiu-jitsu – heaving you back to that precise moment in history, then lifting your soul out of your skin in one seamless move.

King’s fluid direction of her four actors means the snug setting never feels dramatically constricting, while their jostling performance styles make each combination of voices feels like its own distinct treat.

The sheer compassion of Zhao's direction is one of the film's most elemental pleasures, while McDormand is one of those rare actors who can somehow make the act of listening as thrilling as a barnstorming speech.

One of the finest films of the year: a shiveringly passionate period piece.

Every story here has heart, soul and grit.

[Kaufman's] film leaves your head spinning.

A surging tsunami-crash of creativity and beauty.

Perhaps more than any other Disney live-action remake to date, Mulan feels like a blockbuster version of great mime – it’s performed with such consummate precision and showmanship that at times you would swear you were watching something with a heart.

The depth, subtlety and wit of Pattinson and Debicki’s performances only becomes fully apparent once you know where Tenet is going, or perhaps that should be where it’s been. Still confused? Don’t be. Or rather do be, and savour it. This is a film that will cause many to throw up their hands in bamboozlement – and many more, I hope, to clasp theirs in awe and delight.

And there we were thinking the stage recording of Hamilton was going to be the best thing on Disney+ this summer. Fools! Yes, Hamilton has songs, but does it have motorbikes? Synchronised swimming? Beyonce singing on the moon in diamonds? Naomi Campbell? I haven’t even got to the poodles yet.

As a psychothriller, it gives itself one simple assignment – to set your heart rate pounding through the roof. And on this level, with a lurid voltage that might require health warnings, it nastily delivers.

The movie sorely needs a tighter edit, and direction from Apatow that isn't so slapdash and sitcommy.

Sleekly enjoyable.

One of the great pleasures of the collection is watching human ingenuity at work almost in real time, as each filmmaker in turn fathoms what’s possible, then keeps pushing, to regularly thrilling effect.

Sending up the Eurovision Song Contest is like flattening Salisbury Plain: one quick look at the thing should be enough to reassure you that the job took care of itself long ago. Nevertheless, Will Ferrell has decided to give it a shot, and the result is this pulverisingly unfunny and vacuous two-hour gauntlet run of non-tertainment.

What’s striking about the film’s tone is its redemptive warmth. Though the details are chilling, it’s as if a cathartic space has been opened for these girls and their families to explain what they went through.

The film tries to scale a gargantuan mountain of a subject – the broken voting system – and just keeps slipping repeatedly down the sides

There’s enough in Mr Jones to make you want a good deal more.

The end product is all but unfollowable, thanks either to a screenplay that was incoherent to begin with, or an edit so slicingly brutal that almost every trace of the plot’s connective tissue was chopped out.

With a story that straddles two generations and stretches from Trump’s United States to the Vietnam jungle, Da 5 Bloods is one of Spike Lee’s most expansive films to date. But it’s built with the precise, snap-shut mechanisms of an ancient moral fable – a Pardoner’s Tale made about and for unpardonable times.

Sometimes it just takes one actor to elevate a film from innocuous, take-it-or-leave it fare into something winningly tender – and if your first film’s needing that kind of lift-off, you could hardly do much better than Monica Dolan.

The existential crises of music industry hotshots in Los Angeles might struggle to mark it out, to say the least, as a film for our moment. At the same time, it’s a refuge – a balmy vision of cloudless blue skies, rooftop martinis on someone else’s tab, and a few soulful jamming sessions in a recording studio no one’s using. You could disappear into Nisha Ganatra’s film for a couple of hours and easily forget where the evening went.

If you're a fan of hers, you've heard it all before. Still, if you're a fan of hers, there is plenty here to enjoy.

Like its absurdly named hero, Extraction gets a serious and deeply silly job done in style.

Incoherent two-hour fantasy epic isn’t quite accurate: it’s more of an incoherent one-and-a-quarter-hour fantasy epic, plus an all-star warm-up.

Quietly disturbing but also darkly amusing to the end.

To watch it is to be waterboarded by joy. In terms of both visual dazzle and invention and sheer comedic stamina and pep, it handily surpasses the original Trolls from 2016, which itself set an impressive new standard for films based on novelty keyrings and pencil toppers.

Elephant is set in a world without poachers, developers or tourists: the picture it paints is beautiful and educative, but doesn’t feel quite complete

If you want to watch an elaborate metaphor being wrung out like a bathing suit for an hour and a half, The Platform might be the film for you.

The film is close to parody – not of anything Potter’s ever done, but of male artists and their obsessive end-of-life regrets. If you’d told me it was a shelved adaptation of late Philip Roth done by Alejandro González Iñárritu in Birdman (or Biutiful) mode, I’d have believed it in a shot.

If Hollywood really is an elite liberal bubble, Damon Lindelof might just be the prick it needs.

A wild and righteous provocation.

Thanks to one of the most indestructible poster campaigns ever designed, the words Les Misérables can’t help but call a child’s face to mind.

In a classic Brit-com flanking manoeuvre, the film tries to simultaneously reduce the viewer to tears while inviting us to bask in the fuzzy glow of our friends and neighbours’s innate decency. Luckily it succeeds, thanks in no small part to the commitment shown by Horgan and Scott Thomas.